The forgetting of the history of marginalized groups is both a cause and effect of their marginalization.

Americans are in serious intellectual trouble - in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

The government should not be in the business of funneling money for social services through any faith-based organization

We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.

one of the great weaknesses of the women's rights movement over the past two hundred years has been the tendency of its history to disappear, so that it must be resurrected for each new generation.

Real-life discussions involve a great many bores and boors who have never learned that the art of conversation demands listening as well as talking.

Whether you are religious or nonreligious, may you find solace in the knowledge that the suffering is ours, but that those we love suffer no more.

The biggest religious wars and persecutions in history occur when religions, each claiming their own absolute truths, come into conflict.

At its heart, all intellectual and emotional life is a conversation, and the conversation begins at birth.

I feel Jewish in the sense of culturally Jewish, I suppose the way Bernie Sanders feels Jewish, but not Jewish in a religious sense.

I have always regarded the development of the individual as the only legitimate goal of education.

In the beginning, the call of God was not propositional. It was experiential. (p. 10)

Every avalanche was once a lonely snowflake, every flood was once an aching raindrop.

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.

The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart. That's where you need to go

While nothing is more uncertain than a single life, nothing is more certain than the average duration of a thousand lives.

Unpremeditated music is the true gauge which measures the current of our thoughts; the very undertow of our life's stream.

Unless you invest in people, you are not going to see growth in the long term, the medium term, and maybe even the short term.

Fred is officially the mayor of Portland now.

Are science and religion compatible? It's like, are science and plumbing compatible? They're just two different things.